[News] Israel admits burning hundreds of people on 7 October

[Anti-Imperialist News]

electronicintifada.net
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israel-admits-burning-hundreds-people-7-october>
Israel admits burning hundreds of people on 7 October

Ali Abunimah <https://electronicintifada.net/people/ali-abunimah> - 17
November 2023
------------------------------
[image: Houses and buildings reduced to rubble in Kibbutz Be'eri]

Israel has never explained how Palestinian fighters who crossed from Gaza
on 7 October could have caused mass destruction to Israeli homes, as seen
here in Kibbutz Be’eri, with their light weapons. There’s mounting evidence
that heavy, indiscriminate fire by Israeli forces killed Palestinians and
Israeli civilians alike.
Polaris

On Thursday, MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan challenged
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HD-yRuTasHU> Israeli government
spokesperson Mark Regev about the many lies and false claims that Israel
has made to justify its genocidal bombing and invasion of Gaza.

While attempting to parry Hasan’s challenges, Regev told many more lies,
trying to change the subject and shift the blame for the horrifying toll
away from Israel and onto Israel’s Palestinian victims.

But Regev made one admission whose significance neither Regev nor Hasan
appears to have recognized.

Regev was trying to make the point that Israel – supposedly unlike Hamas –
can be trusted because when Israel makes a mistake, it admits it.

Regev gave this example: “We originally said, in the atrocious Hamas attack
upon our people on October 7th, we had the number at 1,400 casualties and
now we’ve revised that down to 1,200 because we understood that we’d
overestimated, we made a mistake. There were actually bodies that were so
badly burnt we thought they were ours, in the end apparently they were
Hamas terrorists.”
Earlier this month, Israel did in fact revise down
<https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-revises-death-toll-oct-7-hamas-attack-around-1200-2023-11-10/>
the number of Israelis it says were killed on 7 October to “around 1,200.”

Although it has offered no direct evidence, Israel has claimed
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-worse-than-isis-its-atrocities-worst-since-holocaust-netanyahu-tells-biden/>
that Hamas fighters burned Israeli civilians en masse, in atrocities not
seen since the Holocaust.

Israel has also never explained how Palestinians fighters could have
achieved this or caused the enormous damage to Israeli houses with only the
light weapons they were generally seen carrying.

It simply makes no sense that 200 bodies burned beyond recognition that
Israel thought were Israeli civilians could turn out to be Hamas fighters
unless Israel killed people indiscriminately.

Obviously Hamas fighters did not set themselves on fire and burn themselves
beyond recognition. And Israel must know the circumstances in which these
people died.
Evidence Israel killed its own

Regev’s statement is a significant addition to the mounting evidence that
on 7 October Israeli forces went on a panicked rampage, firing wildly with
powerful weapons, indiscriminately killing both Palestinian fighters and
the Israeli civilians who were with them.

That is the testimony of Yasmin Porat
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/israeli-forces-shot-their-own-civilians-kibbutz-survivor-says/38861>,
an Israeli civilian who survived a massacre by Israeli forces at Kibbutz
Be’eri.

And the Israeli air force has admitted
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/shoot-everything-how-israeli-pilots-killed-their-own-civilians>
that it sent up more than two dozen attack helicopters which fired huge
amounts of heavy cannon shells and Hellfire missiles on 7 October, even
though in many cases the pilots could not tell Palestinians apart from
Israeli civilians.

“Shoot at everything,” one squadron leader told his men.

Later in the Mehdi Hasan interview, Regev regurgitates the standard Israeli
propaganda claim that the civilian death toll in Gaza is so high because
Hamas uses civilians as “human shields.”

Hasan challenges this with what he poses as a hypothetical question. He
asks Regev: “Would you bomb schools and houses in Israel if Hamas militants
were believed to be under them and kill Israeli human shields in the
process?”

Hasan does not seem to realize that this is *exactly what Israel did* on
and after 7 October, as growing
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/watch-video-about-7-october-youtube-doesnt-want-you-see>
evidence
<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/10/a-growing-number-of-reports-indicate-israeli-forces-responsible-for-israeli-civilian-and-military-deaths-following-october-7-attack/>
indicates
<https://thegrayzone.com/2023/10/27/israels-military-shelled-burning-tanks-helicopters/>
.

Needless to say, Regev did not provide any meaningful answer.
Israel’s continued disregard for the lives of its own civilians has been
amply demonstrated by its carpet bombing of Gaza that is endangering
<https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/hamas-armed-wing-more-than-60-hostages-are-missing-due-israeli-airstrikes-2023-11-04/>
and killing <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67414353> Israeli
and foreign citizens detained there. Burned cars, burned bodies

It is also notable that graphic images of badly burned bodies in cars that
Israel released in its initial propaganda blitz after 7 October, bear a
striking resemblance to the car of a Lebanese family Israel shelled across
the border in southern Lebanon on 6 November, killing three young girls and
their grandmother, and wounding their mother:
Up until now, mainstream Western media – following the line from their
governments – have refused to challenge Israel’s increasingly threadbare
claims about what happened on 7 October.

There needs to be a full, independent inquiry into what happened –
something neither Israel nor its American and European enablers are likely
to demand or allow.

That is because there is already undeniable evidence – and Regev’s
statement corroborates it – that the leaders in Tel Aviv ordering the
massacres of Palestinian civilians already had the blood of many Israeli
civilians on their hands even before the first bomb dropped on Gaza.
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